Anti-Consumerism | Frugality | Authenticity

If there was only more time…

It’s awesome, it’s something I’m excited for. But I have to move for it. I have found myself saying, if only I had a couple more weeks to get everything done I wanted to do.

I could get through the sludge of backlog stuff I had on my plate. Instead, I only have a quick week and a half to compress everything. I put my two week notice in at my current job, on break I was telling my coworkers, that this is it, I’m outta here with only a few shifts left, it turns out that would be my last day working with a couple of my close associates. But that’s it, that’s how the chips fell and it’s the decision I made. Life is ephemeral, on average we’re here for about 70 years and then it’s all over. The moment comes and then it passes, it’s what makes life interesting, it what makes life worth living, it is what makes life beautiful.

I remember when I first moved to where I am currently, I was working full time hours at a part time job, I had so many side things I wanted to do, trails to explore, geocaches to find, things to do, my brief couple days off were sacrosanct, I forwent sleep to ensure i had had enough time to try to get through what I wanted to do. I recall my eyes burning as I jumped on my bike to go explore some trails on a rainy Monday morning, a NPR podcast about the Iran nuclear deal was blaring in my ear, puddles splashed against my toes, uncovered by my sandals. It was a good time, I was an experience maximizer. My weekends grew fat when my hours were culled, and then I had more time. I shifted down to second gear and I had more time to do things. It brings me back to the wildly fantastical thought experiment of living forever (or a really long time). Some salivate at the prospect of having centuries to do basically everything. But would we? I like to think of this in terms of the basic economic tenets of supply and demand, as the supply of time goes up, demand staying constant, it yields a drop in price, or in this case value. We have centuries to do nothing, we have centuries to browse Reddit until orange and blue arrows get burned into our vision. Why learn Latin when you can do it tomorrow? We already live decently long lives, yet we always put things on for tomorrow, would hundreds of more years mean more experiences?

This post isn’t a regret piece, yes, I leave things unfinished, not because I sat around for weeks punting it off onto the plate of tomorrow, but because summer came a little too late. But more importantly because as I did things, more things came. Life should be about a convener belt of experiences, a ship that is always out at sea, not tightly mourned to the city docks. Unfortunately the insurmountable litany of things to do comes up against the hard reality of the finite amount of time, and it is life that yields to the sands of time.